Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

“If the Chinese are behind this, what will Ryan do about it?”

“Without proof? I wouldn’t do a damn thing if I were him.”

“And when he gets his proof?”

Werley shook his head. “I don’t even want to think about it.” He snorted. “Hope to God I’m wrong. I probably am. Even the Chinese can’t be that crazy. I just can’t figure out who else would have the capability of doing this—whatever the hell ‘this’ is.”

Logan’s eyes narrowed. “Daddy always said, ‘Bad news comes in threes.’ Another shoe’s gonna drop. I can feel it in my bones. It’s just a matter of where, and when, and how bad.”

Logan dismissed Werley with a grunt as he turned back around to the Smith machine. He watched the door close behind Werley in the workout mirror as he wrapped his gorilla hands around the steel bar.

The world can wait, he thought. The iron can’t.

He’d done his part.

47

OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE

The drive over to the computer lab was another perk of the job. The green, pine-studded hills and crisp fall air of East Tennessee lifted her spirits this morning. Parsons’s spirits had needed lifting, as she dreaded the so-called emergency meeting Rhodes had scheduled via text early yesterday.

Usually these emergency meetings were like nursing calls. Rhodes would hit the panic button and Nurse Parsons would run into his room fearing the worst only to discover that all he needed was his filthy bedpan emptied.

Rhodes was a trained physicist, for sure, and not without some talent in the lab. He was also a scratch golfer. The fact he had a Ph.D. in physics didn’t mean he was good enough to drive the science at the lab any more than his par golf meant he could beat Tiger Woods at the Masters.

She pulled her pearl white Subaru Outback into the tree-lined parking lot. She found a space next to the sign announcing RESERVED FOR DIRECTOR RHODES, and his silver G-Class Mercedes wagon. She killed the engine, keeping her eyes on the Mercedes, a vehicle she’d like to own one day but never could on her government salary. Rhodes had been smart enough to segue into the private sector early. He made great money as a partner at a lobbying firm for a big defense contractor before transitioning back into the public sector.

Good for him.

The man might not have been a world-class scientist, but he was brilliant in his own way, discovering early in his career that he was a supremely gifted politician, both in the boardroom and on Capitol Hill. The DOE had decided they needed a man like him to run the program since it was a federally funded project. Quantum bits and entangled particles didn’t fuel RAPTURE.

Money did.

That was okay by her.

—

Parsons smiled at the uniformed guard in the glass booth. He nodded back a little too eagerly, his wolfish eyes raking over her hard, lean body dressed in form-fitting slacks and a turtleneck sweater beneath a lambswool vest.

She passed by the sign in red letters, NO STICKER, NO PHONE, warning her that if her government-issued cell phone didn’t have the required security sticker, it couldn’t be taken into the area where she was heading.

No problem. Parsons was a stickler for the rules, particularly when it came to security.

—

Dr. David Rhodes greeted Dr. Kate Parsons at the door, holding a cup of black coffee out to her.

“I know it’s early. I picked this up for you.”

“Thanks, David.”

“Please, have a seat.”

She sat in the buttery soft leather chair across from his desk as he took his seat. Her phone buzzed. “Mind if I get this text?”

“Of course not.”

He watched her flip through her text one-handed, an unlacquered thumbnail scrolling through a block of words while sipping coffee with the other hand. She was a real worker.

Parsons was an attractive woman, for sure. Not cover-girl hot but striking nonetheless, he thought, with her short red hair and dark green eyes. Those were hard to miss. Parsons was the kind of woman that turned heads when she passed by. There was an energy about her, due in part to her incredible athleticism. He chided himself for paying a little too much attention to her shapely figure whenever she walked into a room, and especially when she walked out of it.

He was happily married, but he wasn’t dead, was he?

But it was Parsons’s incredible intellect that electrified a room. Beautiful women didn’t intimidate him, but brilliant minds like hers did. He was no slouch in the education department—a Stanford Ph.D. meant something—but his brain didn’t hold a candle to hers.

But it wasn’t really her brains or her good looks that made him painfully self-conscious when he was around her.

It was guilt.

If IQ were the sole hiring criterion, Parsons would be running the RAPTURE project. But for all of her many and considerable assets, Kate was lacking in people skills. Sure, she was perfectly friendly, and an excellent communicator. She had done a great job leading the initial team and laying the foundation for a project that would likely change history, maybe more so than the Manhattan Project.

He always thought that it was fitting that RAPTURE was also being designed in Oak Ridge. Even the building they were sitting in was within shouting distance of the original graphite reactor. Ironic that the geniuses assembled to conquer nuclear power on the Oak Ridge campus so many decades ago didn’t have a single computer to rely on, whereas RAPTURE was only and all about computational power.

Much like Parsons. She was nothing but computational power. Her eyes bore through you like a laser when she asked you questions that you both knew you couldn’t answer, and made you burn with shame. She was always the smartest person in the room. Everybody knew it and everybody hated her for it because she lacked the grace to hide the obvious.

Now that RAPTURE was a fully funded federal program, new skill sets were required. It meant lobbying on the Hill, shaking the right hands, and turning the impossibly complex into the understandable for Washington midwits.

For better or for worse, Rhodes was the face of RAPTURE now because he was the one testifying behind closed doors in subcommittee meetings. Of course, Parsons remained the genius behind the actual work. She really should be getting all the credit. But neither life nor government-funded science were fair. He didn’t make the rules. He just played by them, and played by them very well.

He watched her close up her phone, grateful that she’d always been cool about the awkward situation they were in. He knew her second-class status had to be hard on her ego but she never showed it at work. She was a real pro and clearly dedicated to the greater cause of advancing human knowledge.

Thank God for that. Without Parsons, the project would die a long, malingering death.

—

Dr. David Rhodes sat behind his polished mahogany desk in the wide corner office on the second floor, an expanse of pine trees and rolling hills framed in the giant picture window behind him. Photos of Rhodes posing with congressmen and senators whose names Parsons didn’t know hung on the wall. There were also numerous awards and honorifics he’d earned over the years, mostly for philanthropic work. There was even a framed photo of Rhodes receiving an award from the hands of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Rhodes’s office was located just two miles away from the Spallation Neutron Source facility where she had run into Tad/Ted two days before. A shiver ran down Parsons’s spine, and other parts of her as well, after reading the text he’d just sent. The man showed promise.

She slipped the phone back into her purse.

“Sorry about that, David.”

“No worries.” He forced a smile. Something was obviously bothering him.